[plt-scheme] debugging [mini rant]

2009/7/29 Paulo J. Matos <pocmatos at gmail.com>:
> On Wed, 2009-07-29 at 00:23 +0200, Jens Axel Søgaard wrote:
>> 2009/7/28 Paulo J. Matos <pocmatos at gmail.com>:
>> > On Tue, 2009-07-28 at 16:12 -0500, Mike Eggleston wrote:
>>
>> >> Is there a command line debugger in mzscheme?
>>
>> > - Is a command line debugger planned?
>>
>> I am curious, do you use debuggers in other programming environments?
>> If so, in which situations do you find them useful?
>>
>
> Yes, I use gdb a lot with C and C++. I find them very useful to step
> through some piece of code which is generating a strange value.

Is this faster than sprinkling the code with print statements?

> For me they are particularly useful when debugging algorithms that
> either involve a lot of mathematics or which has a complex flow.

For the first purpose (mathematical expressions) I see that as sign to
break down the function into smaller ones, and then write a few tests
for each.

The second, well it takes ages to follow complicated flows in a
debugger, so for me I have found testing each component independently
usually is faster.
-- 
Jens Axel Søgaard